Seed
: Chapter 13

Jack hadn’t been back to Rosewood in nearly twenty years, but as soon as he crossed the town limit, an air of familiarity wrapped itself around him. He drove along Rosewood’s main street, passing locations he hadn’t given even a passing consideration since he was a kid. There was the old Pizza Hut, where he had attended his first all-kid birthday party and learned how to play PacMan on a flat-top arcade table. There was the mini golf course where he had scored a hole in one, an achievement he had bragged about for days before Stephen lost his temper and told him it wasn’t that big a deal. The Superette, where he’d swiped a Pez dispenser, was still standing. Gilda had marched him right back into that store and made him hand it over to the manager, successfully crowning it the most humiliating moment of his entire childhood.

The further he drove the more spread out things became. Rosewood’s main street ended in a fork—a right turn would take him to the rural road where their trailer sat, hiding the secret cemetery behind it like some sort of blight. Jack came to a complete stop at the junction, hesitated, then veered right, the giant’s howl of laughter echoing inside his head.

That rural road hadn’t changed. The pavement was still as bad as ever, monster potholes playing their part as permanent roadside obstacles. The tall grass and weeping trees were identical to what he remembered from his youth. He’d walked up and down this road during summer vacations a hundred times over, making the long and humid trek from the trailer to the drive-in for a cherry-flavored slush so cold it froze his brain every time. Some of the trailers that had been parked along that road were gone, and the spots they’d sat over were long overgrown. A few of the houses were still there—some spruced up with new paint and upgraded roofs, others fallen into disrepair. A few looked like they’d been torn down either by the county or a tornado, faint signs of remaining foundations the only clue that a house had ever stood there at all. Rosewood wasn’t a place people wanted to raise their kids. It was nice and quaint and humble and had that air of classic Southern hospitality, but it wasn’t the type of place you wanted to spend your whole life unless your whole life was already behind you.

Jack passed the ghosts of his childhood at fifteen miles per hour, going as slow as he was partially to take in the scenery, partially to delay the inevitable. The road leading to where he grew up eventually gave way to nothing but sagging trees and a locust hum. There was an invisible barrier that the folks of Rosewood knew not to cross, and the Winters trailer sat far beyond it.

As Jack crept along, he eventually caught sight of what he’d come back to Georgia to see—that trailer, still sitting far within no man’s land. Alone. Washed out. Nothing but a bad memory.

Something about seeing his childhood home in such disrepair afforded him a strange sense of disappointment. The front porch, which had been Gilda’s favorite place, had dislocated itself from the front of the house and sagged into the yard like a broken limb. The porch steps were destroyed—half of them missing, the other half on the ground, rotting into the soil. The corrugated metal that had covered their roof had been peeled back; most likely the work of an unforgiving storm. The majority of the windows were broken, and the screen door hung outward on a single hinge like a loose tooth. The next storm that whipped through Georgia would take it clean off. The siding that Stephen had put up to make the trailer look ‘nice’ was rusted over and had come loose, jutting into the wild grass like an outstretched hand asking for help.

Jack guided the Olds onto the spot that used to be the driveway. He approached the trailer with caution, his hands shoved firmly in the pockets of his jeans. It was like a bad accident along the side of the road—he didn’t want to look, didn’t want to remember, but those dingy broken windows called out to him. Come look inside, they said. Come see what you left behind.

Avoiding the destroyed front deck, he stepped around back where his bedroom window had been, pausing when he spotted the collection of holes that decorated the paneling there. It was where Stephen had nailed two-by-fours to the outside of the house. He took a forward step, his curiosity getting the best of him, wanting to get a peek at the room that used to be his.

“Can I help you?”

Jack veered around. A man in tattered jeans and a faded t-shirt stood not five yards from him, shielding his eyes from the early morning sun.

“Um…” Caught off-guard: Jack hadn’t expected to see anyone here. “Hi.” He lifted a hand in greeting, the way they did in space movies, cautiously greeting an alien race.

“Howdy,” the man replied, then paraphrased the question Jack had failed to answer. “What can I do you for?”

Glancing over his shoulder, he hitched a thumb at the trailer. “I used to live here,” he said.

“That right?”

“Long time ago. Just came back to see if it was still here.”

“It’s still here, alright.” The guy stalked over and stopped in the thin strip of shadow that ran along the length of that mobile home, hiding from the sun. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped down his face. “I’ve been meaning to haul this old bitch out of here for years now, but I just haven’t been able to justify the cost.”

“You own the land?”

“Bought thirty acres out here about fifteen years ago. It’s out of the way but still close to town. Good for farming.”

“Is that when the people who lived here moved out?”

The guy folded his handkerchief, careful to match the ends to one another, then slid it into the back pocket of his jeans.

“This place was empty when I got here. From what I know, it was empty for years before. Looked just about the same now as it did when I showed up.”

Jack hesitated, considering whether he actually wanted to ask the question that was poised at the tip of his tongue. It was unlikely this guy would have the answer he was looking for, but he’d driven hundreds of miles—the least he could do was convince himself that he hadn’t driven to Georgia for nothing.

“Do you know where they went?”

It was the land owner’s turn to pause. He gave Jack a once-over, then turned his attention back to the dilapidated trailer taking up space on his land. His eyes crinkled in the corners as he peered at it, then glanced back to Jack with a curious expression.

“I moved to Rosewood a year before I bought this property, so I’m no expert in local history,” he explained. “People told me I was crazy buying this land. People in town say it’s cursed.”

Jack tried not to react. He stood motionless, concentrating on keeping his expression as unreadable as possible. But his heart was thumping in his ears.

“Why do they say that?”

The guy shrugged.

“Those folks,” he said, motioning to the trailer. “The rumor is they were found dead in there.”

Jack’s jaw clenched.

“They say it was bad, like someone went ballistic on them; real dirty, like the person doing the killing didn’t just want them dead, but wanted them good and dead.” He paused, shrugged again, shot Jack another smile, this one wider than the other. “But that’s all just rumors. For all I know, it could be a bunch of hogwash… someone making up stories, trying to swipe a good land deal out from under my feet when I was buying.”

Jack felt like he was floating, like his chest had closed up and the air forced from his lungs.

“If you want more information on those folks, you should see a gal named Ginny. She lives in town, works up at the bowling alley. She calls herself Rosewood’s historical expert. If anyone knows about what happened around here, it would be her.”

Jack nodded. “I think I’ll do that,” he said, but it was the last thing he wanted to do. If the story was true—if Stephen and Gilda had been murdered—he didn’t want to know about it. He didn’t want to even consider.

He turned back to the Olds, unsteady on his feet, and paused beside the front wheel when he thought of one last thing.

“They let you farm here despite the cemetery being there?”

The land owner furrowed his eyebrows in confusion. “Cemetery?”

Jack pointed to the tree line a few hundred yards away, but the guy shook his head with a blank expression on his face.

“Must be mistaken,” he told Jack. “There’s never been any cemetery here.”

Jack forced a smile of thanks and ducked into the car. Staring at the trailer, he knew one thing for sure: if that cemetery was gone, Stephen and Gilda were certainly dead.

The girls tore into the kitchen for their breakfast. Aimee’s nerves buzzed. She turned, saw Charlie standing beside her, and immediately sidestepped away from the girl. Her heart fluttered in her chest as Charlie stalked around the kitchen, only able to catch her breath when Charlie finally took a seat at the table and waited for her hash browns. Aimee was scared of her own child, and she wasn’t sure whether to be disgusted with herself or feel justified.

Still somber about Nubs, Abby sat at the table with her head in her hands. Charlie, however, didn’t seem the least bit phased by the sudden absence of their pet. Aimee delivered the girls’ plates to the table, took a seat, and placed a hand on Abby’s back.

“What would you say if we went down to the animal shelter today?”

Abby didn’t respond. She gave Aimee a blank look, then peered at her breakfast, waiting for it to crawl off her plate. Charlie was the first to react, bouncing up and down in her chair with a grin.

“To get a new dog?” she asked.

“Well, maybe not right away,” Aimee said. “Maybe we can just look and think about what we want to do.”

“I don’t want another dog,” Abigail murmured into her hands. Charlie went quiet and cast a look at her mother, searching for assurance that they would, in fact, get a new pet. Aimee kept quiet, and Charlie frowned at her sister.

“Why not?” she asked. “Dogs are cool.”

“Don’t push,” Aimee warned.

“I just don’t,” Abby said. “I don’t ever want another dog again.”

“But we’re going to get one,” Charlie told her, self-assured. “So when we get one, I guess you’re going to hate it.”

“I guess,” Abby told her plate.

“We can get another dog, can’t we? Not getting another one would be stupid, right, Momma?”

“Girls…”

Abigail pressed her palms against the lip of the table and shoved. The legs of her chair screamed against the linoleum. “I said I don’t want another dog!” Abby snapped. “I don’t want another dog! I don’t want another dog!”

“You’re just an idiot!” Charlie yelled back.

Abby stared at her sister with giant eyes, tears shimmering in the sunlight filtering through the kitchen curtains.

“I just want Nubs back,” Abby whispered, then pressed her hands to her face and began to cry.

Charlie’s expression went hard at her sister’s breakdown. She shoved her breakfast away, got up from the table, and stared at Abby for a long moment before hissing out her words.

“He was just a stupid dog. He got what he deserved.”

Then she turned on her heels and stomped out of the room.

Shock stalled Abby’s tears. She stared down the hall after her sister, her mouth slack. Aimee sat frozen as well, her own tears—ones of panic—slowly bubbling up her esophagus, clawing at the backs of her eyes.

Jack couldn’t recall ever going to the bowling alley when he was a kid, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know where it was. Turning down a few streets and pulling into a rough-looking parking lot brought him to Top Pin, its sign rusted and its paintjob fading.

Inside it smelled like a roller rink; the scent of buttered popcorn mingling with the smell of old bowling shoes and dingy carpeting. Jack followed a trail of cartoon pins etched into the carpet. They brought him to the main counter, where an acne-plagued teen sat on a stool reading an old MAD magazine, a giant wall of cubbies stuffed with clown shoes towering behind him.

“Hey,” Jack said. The kid looked up, forced a fake smile, and stood out of obligation.

“We aren’t open for another fifteen minutes,” he said. “But I can get you your shoes at least. You with the league?”

Empty bowling lanes flanked the far wall of the establishment. The place was abandoned save for the kid in front of him and another popping popcorn at the snack bar.

“I’m actually looking for someone. Ginny?”

The kid squinted at Jack, then pursed his lips in a pensive sort of way.

“Ginny doesn’t really deal with customers,” he said. “She’s more of a back office type of person.”

“But I’m not a customer.”

“Same goes for non-customers.” The kid settled back onto his stool and flipped a page of his magazine. “Probably double.”

“I was told that she’s a Rosewood history expert.”

The kid didn’t budge, unimpressed.

“Listen,” Jack said, “I need her help. I’ve driven all the way from Louisiana. I left my wife and kids alone and drove eight hours just to revisit this shithole.”

The teen raised an eyebrow.

“So please,” he continued, “cut me some slack.”

Motivation didn’t come easily to the pimply-faced teen, so Jack threw out one last bone. The land-owner had mentioned that the old trailer was the stuff of legend. If anyone followed stories of local axe murders, it was kids like this one.

“Tell her I’m here to ask her about the trailer out on Route 17.”

Like a dog with a steak dangled before his nose, the kid sat at attention.

“That place?” he asked. “Man, what do you want with that place? That place is evil.”

“What do you mean?” There was another unwelcome word: evil. The answers he was looking for grew darker at every turn.

“People don’t go out on that road after dark,” the kid confessed. “Those who do only do it on a dare. If you drive past that trailer at night, your engine cuts out and you end up stranded, and the thing that killed those folks… it still wanders up and down that strip of land, waiting for its next victim.”

Jack actually cracked a grin. He hadn’t meant to, but it was so ridiculous it curled the corners of his mouth.

“That sounds pretty farfetched. I’d say it reeks of urban legend.”

“Yeah, maybe.” The kid scratched his chin, barely missing a swollen zit. “But you know what they say about urban legends: all legends are based on at least a little bit of truth.” He hopped off his stool and motioned for Jack to follow. “Ginny’s in the back,” he said. “I’ll take you to her.”

Ginny wasn’t what Jack had expected. He had pictured a homely old girl, the kind that lives with a hundred cats. But Ginny was nothing like that at all. The woman who greeted Jack looked young for her age. Her hair was a luxurious red without a spot of grey—red like summer sunset after a storm. Her eyes twinkled with mischief, and when she smiled her face lit up like the Fourth of July. The pimpled kid left Jack in the back office, and Ginny greeted him with a wide smile and an extended hand.

“Well aren’t you a handsome young man?” Her cheeks flushed with a touch of pink. “Please tell me you’re Rosewood’s newest resident.”

Jack exhaled a quiet chuckle and Ginny motioned to a pair of chairs in front of her desk. She took a seat next to him, folding her hands in her lap.

“I actually live in Louisiana,” Jack explained.

“Oh, wonderful. If I could pick up and move away, I’d live there too. Beautiful place, really. Not that Georgia is anywhere near an eyesore,” Ginny teased. “We’re all peaches out here.” She waved a hand at herself and playfully rolled her eyes.

“You’re the Rosewood historical expert,” Jack said, and Ginny chuckled, pressing a hand to her chest, flattered.

“Is that what they’re saying? I suppose I do know a thing or two about this little corner of the world.”

“I’m here about the trailer out on Route 17.”

Just as expected, Ginny’s smiling face went hard.

“Do you know anything about that?” Jack asked, but she didn’t have to answer. Her expression gave her away. She knew far more than she wanted to. Suddenly, the Southern hospitality that she couldn’t help but exude vanished as quick as a roach in a brightly lit room.

“Oh, I know plenty about that,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I want to spend any time talking about it.”

Jack nodded slowly. He hadn’t considered the possibility of Ginny not wanting to discuss it.

“I know it isn’t a pleasant topic,” Jack began.

Ginny shook her head with a snort.

“Darlin’, pleasant isn’t the word for it. That trailer is a curse on this town.”

Jack kept his mouth shut, hoping his silence would urge her to continue. Sometimes, all people need is a little bit of room; as soon as you step back, they open up like a flimsy bag of marbles. And that’s exactly what old Ginny needed—space. As soon as he stopped asking questions, she was giving him the answers he was looking for.

“That trailer wasn’t always there,” she told him. “One day that field was empty, and the next there’s that trailer, come out of nowhere like someone had dropped it out of the sky. And the folks who lived in it…” She clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Strange people—the kind of folks that don’t really talk to anyone. Sure, we’d see them out and about. It’s hard not to in a place like this. You can’t fart without half the town knowing about it.”

Jack cracked a grin. Ginny warmed up again when she caught his smile.

“I didn’t know them personally, but I do remember their names. There was Steve and there was Glenda.”

Close enough, Jack thought.

“They had a little boy. Cute little kid, as I remember. Always friendly, always smiling… seemed like a happy child despite his oddball parents. At least that’s what everyone thought at first.”

“At first?”

“You know the saying ‘he seemed like such a nice boy’? That didn’t come from nowhere. The craziest of them all seem nice and normal and happy until some vital part of their brain fries like bad wiring. Granted, nobody really knows what happened that night,” she assured him. “But we all have our hunches, and most of those hunches point to that nice little boy not being so nice after all. That cute smiling face was nothing more than a disguise.”

Jack shook his head mutely.

“Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” she said. “A mask.”

“For what?” he asked, his skin prickly with hypersensitivity. It felt like someone had stuck a live wire into his shoes and turned up the electricity just high enough to rattle his teeth.

“Well, if you go by what happened in that trailer on 17—if you go by what most of Rosewood believes happened—I’d say it was a mask for whatever evil was lurking behind that kid’s eyes.”

Jack had heard enough. He sat there, trying to convince himself that there was nothing left to learn. And yet he heard himself ask a question, detached and far away.

“What happened?”

She shook her head, and for a moment he was relieved. He’d reached Ginny’s limit; the invisible line that she wouldn’t cross. But as soon as he began to relax, she started up again.

“There was a murder,” she told him, and every hair on Jack’s body stood at attention. “But you wouldn’t be asking about that trailer if you didn’t already know that.”

He went silent once more, wondering how it was possible that he wanted to get up but couldn’t. Something was holding him down, pressing him into that chair. Just the same as there had been an invisible hand guiding him to that dilapidated gas station. Just the same as how someone had put the land-owner out on that property. Just like how something had led him to this woman.

Something wanted him to sit and listen and not move.

“Since those folks were loners, it took the police a good four or five days to find them. The man, Steve, had some sort of job lined up in town—construction or something like that. When he didn’t show up to work and nobody could find him, the cops were sent out to make sure everything was alright out on Route 17.”

Ginny wrung her hands, obviously not comfortable telling this story—but just as something held Jack in place and forced him to listen, it seemed that something was pushing her to keep talking.

“When the police arrived, everything looked fine. There was no sign of a break-in, and something they couldn’t quite figure out was why all the doors had been locked from the inside. It didn’t make much sense, but details like that took a back seat to what they found in there. I could talk all day and I still wouldn’t come close to describing what those officers unearthed inside.”

“Can you try?” someone asked. The voice sounded suspiciously like Jack’s.

“Those folks were torn to pieces,” she told him. “And I don’t mean figuratively. It looked like what they did to criminals a long time back, when they tied a rope around each limb and tied each rope around a horse, sending them in different directions. They couldn’t figure out how a person could manage to do something like that, unless the killer used his bare hands. Well, they just couldn’t put two and two together.”

She paused, took a breath.

“And then the little boy came into question. At first it seemed ridiculous, because how could a child possibly…” She raised her hands to show that she was at a loss, that it still didn’t make sense after all these years. “But the more they looked around the more it looked like nobody had broken in, but that someone had broken out.”

Jack could taste vomit curdling in the back of his throat. He wondered if he’d be able to get out of that chair to grab the small trash can in time, or whether he’d projectile vomit across the expanse of Ginny’s desk.

“And then came the fact that the child was gone; just flat-out vanished into the night. God only knows how young he was. Twelve or thirteen at best. Where’s a kid that young supposed to go without any parents or any money?”

Louisiana, Jack thought.

“The police decided to play it safe and called up a manhunt. They called about six or seven different states to keep an eye out; Amber Alert and all that. Not like it would be difficult to spot a stray that young, especially one without experience of being on his own. They were sure they’d find him within a matter of days… but they didn’t.

“They left it on the assumption that the boy was to blame. At first everyone thought it was a mistake—how could the police not look for a suspect? How could they be so sure such a gruesome crime could have been committed by a child? They eventually revealed the detail that had led them to their conclusion, and that’s when all of Rosewood—all of Georgia, really—stopped doubting and started believing. Looking through that trailer for clues, they found some old boards laying in the grass outside the boy’s window. They found holes around the window on the outside, like those boards had been nailed there to keep the kid in his room. And I guess that’s where it gets really scary.” Ginny frowned, not comfortable with the concept she was about to bring up. No use: she’d already said too much.

“There’s only one reason to board someone up in a room like that, and that’s because you’re afraid of them. Steve and Glenda were scared of their own boy, and they must have had a reason. They knew there was something wrong, that there was something dangerous about that child, so they locked him up like some animal, never expecting that he would get out of that room not just to escape, but to avenge his incarceration. Or maybe he did what he did to reassure them.”

“Reassure them?”

Ginny nodded. “Reassure them that they were right,” she said. “That he wasn’t human: that he was a demon.”

A shudder rang through Jack’s body like a bell. Every nerve hissed. His fingers bit into the arm rests of his chair as though he was being electrocuted—like an epileptic on the cusp of a grand mal. But instead of falling to the ground in a seizure or spewing vomitus across Ginny’s desk, Jack managed to fight the oppressive weight that pressed him down and stood.

“I can’t thank you enough,” he told her, but his tone told a different story. Ginny’s narrative had set him on edge. All he wanted to do was bolt for the door, to run as fast and as far as he could to the point of collapse, and then maybe crumple in front of a big rig as it blew past, too close for the driver to slam on his brakes, torn apart… limb from limb.

Ginny watched him walk to the door, then spoke just as he pulled it open to make his exit.

“I’m Rosewood’s local historical expert. You said it yourself,” she said. “That isn’t a story I like to tell very often. But you asked, and I did. So now I have a question for you.”

Jack already knew what it was. His mouth went dry. He felt his legs wobble, and for a moment he was sure that if she asked what he knew she was going to ask, he’d turn on her; tear her to pieces.

“Jack Winter,” she said. “Did you kill your parents?”

His heart drained of blood. For a half second he couldn’t catch his breath, sure he’d never breathe again. A spark of rage fired in the pit of his stomach, but it subsided quickly, and he managed to form a reply.

With his hand on the doorknob and his back to the woman who had destroyed his entire world, Jack eventually answered.

“I don’t know,” he croaked. “But I think I probably did.”